Hey everyone, welcome back to Animal Wonders.

I’m Jessi and today I have two brand new animals to share with you. We’ve only had them for about a week.

And I’ve been making some really good progress. So, first things first, I need to go get their diets prepared so that I can continue their training session while I go show them to you.   Intro   So, they have a very specific diet. They eat a lot of fruit and they need a low iron pellet that contains most of their nutrients and minerals.

Right now, I have them on Mazuri Low Iron Soft-Bill pellets, and also, one of the other soft-billed pellets that they came with. So, the reason I’m still using some of their old soft-bill mix is because they were showing reluctance to eating the Mazuri soft-bill pellets that I want to transition them on to. Okay, now that I have a variety of fruits all chopped up, let’s go and see them.

Hello Sprite, would you like some of this food. I know it’s very scary, come and get it, you can do it. Good girl.

This is Sprite; she’s a Persa Tauraco, and she has never been hand tamed. She’s fairly young, she’s about seven months old. We’ve been working on getting her on my arms.

Hop on over, good girl. There you go. And just desensitizing her to some movement.

So, again, she came in a week ago, and she had never been hand fed or she had never taken food from someone’s hand. And so, she’s making a ton of progress. When she gets nervous, she flairs out her flight feathers a little bit and you can see that beautiful red underneath there.

So, what we are working here with here is her her fear of me versus how much she wants the food. So, I have figured out that she likes cantaloupe the most. So even this is progress.

When I was first trying to hand-feed her any kind of movement toward her she would spook away from and she still does a little bit. Let’s see if she stays put or if she runs away when I move this toward her. Look at that, awesome.

Bassically, I’m trying to be slow and very obvious with my intentions. And this is me building trust with her. So that she knows what to expect when I come and interact with her.

One last one, good girl. I like to see that movement toward me, it means she’s receptive to it. Alright, I am ready to go meet our second new arrival.

And here we are with this beauty. You wanna come on down and get some treats? Good girl.

This is Sunny, she’s a red-crested turaco. Maybe you’re wondering why we got Sprite and Sunny. And it was because someone had them as pets and discovered, unfortunately they were very, very sensitive and allergic to their dander, and so, they could not live with them anymore.

And they needed to find a home that knew how to take care of them. So, they called us up and asked if we could take them almost immediately, and thankfully, we had some space open for them, and we said yes. So what I am doing with her right now is just working toward getting her to be an ambassador species and to do that I am going to have to put a harness on her because she is totally free flighted and I don’t want her to spook and, you know, fly away or, or get hit by a fan if we’re indoors or something like that.

So, she will have to have a harness slip over her neck. So, I’m just doing tiny little movements to get her used to being touched and every time I touch her, she gets reinforcements. Her favorite food to eat is blueberries.

And I’m going to reach up and I just put my finger underneath her wing. And, see if I can get under this wing here. Good girl.

One more time. Good girl. Cause I will have to move her wings around to put the harness on.

Nicely done, you did so good. Yes you did, beautiful, look at you. My goodness.

So, you can see that Sunny doesn’t mind being touched she doesn’t looove being touched at this point. But she tolerates it pretty good. So, I don’t want to push her to the point where I’m touching her and then she flies away.

I want this to be all either very reinforcing or at least tolerable so I’m not super annoying. That was a nice one. She did not show any signs of getting tense and so I was able to keep my hand there a little bit longer.

I am almost out of blueberries, little girl. Here you go, another blueberry. Hmm, Delicious.

So, Sprite and Sunny are our two new turacos they are here to stay with us and we’re going to do our best to form a really strong trust bond with them and hopefully they’ll both be ambassadors in the future.

Thank you so much, if you’d like to go on an animal adventure with every week subscribe to our channel Animal Wonders Montana. And we’ll see you very soon, bye.